Vanessa Winship

As simple as it was efficacious, August Sander’s approach to photography in his encyclopedic series “People of the 20th Century” is a model whose influence continues to be felt. It is not hard to detect its impact on the British photographer Vanessa Winship’s series “Sweet Nothings: Rural Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia,” 2008, which was published as a book in 2009. Like Sander’s work, Winship’s portraits take a frontal approach and maintain a uniform distance from the subject; the human figure is presented straightforwardly and within his or her everyday environment. Thus, in contrast to Winship’s earlier photographs—those in her book The Black Sea (2007), for instance—this series is not about looking for events to capture and portray. In “Sweet Nothings,” each image makes use of the same preestablished formal pattern. The premise of the photographs

— Pablo Llorca